AUTHOR’S NOTES
Gansbaai is known as the great white shark capital of South Africa. Many of its human inhabitants, however, are unheralded.
by Jolyn Phillips (Modjaji Books) is a debut collection of short fiction that foregrounds the fishing — and farming — folk of this stretch of the Western Cape. Phillips responds here to questions about writing In 2010 I was chosen to take part in the then new Creative Writing module launched by the English department at the University of the Western Cape. I applied because it sounded interesting and there were no examinations for it. In our first workshop, the lecturer gave us a writing prompt: interview a family member and ask them to tell you the oldest story they know.
That prompt made me feel like I was going to fail this assignment. It reminded me of everything since coming to UWC to study. I came here against my parents’ wishes, which I now know was based on immense fear for their daughter and my tongue that just refused to fit in with the language landscapes here in Cape Town; it literally left me tongue-tied.
It made me quiet and as the years went by I silenced myself out of fear of mispronouncing the words and worlds around me. I didn’t have any family to ask. I did not even know what that was out here.
So I tapped into my memory bank. I had my mother reimagined sitting outside on our stoep baking in the sun and I ask her this question. And my memory knew how she would reply but the character said nothing. Perhaps that was a manifestation of my silence. The story only spoke once I investigated those things and people that I allowed to silence me. So I would like to argue that perhaps the stories originated from a place of finding a voice and a magnitude of stories I always had that helped me to sing again.